CLINK/CLANK, A PERCUSSION PLATFORM
I want to create links between architectural space, movement sculpture, process, touch, sound, rhythm, and drawing. I am doing site-specific tile installations that are transformed by the audience interactions and leave traces of their movements.
The walkways/platforms are difficult to walk on, the tiles move slightly under your feet as you walk and can throw you off balance, you need to look where you are going, know where you are. The movement of the tiles creates a vibration that creates the soundscape. The experience has a capacity to be playful, meditative or potentially disruptive or even disturbing depending on the interaction and associations made by the participants and the onlookers.
In the shaped space, the participant can become a dancer, and a musician. The sound and movement make this piece a new experience for each person. The idea of a visceral playful reaction to the installation and the activity and sounds created, interests me and inspires thoughts of how we leave our imprint on our surroundings, how sounds and the traces of our movement change the space we move through to create our mental and physical environment.
The drawings in the exhibition are traces of my process of cutting the tiles. The traces are produced by the nature of the actions and the material choices. I use red earthenware clay that contains iron oxide and vellum paper that develops a more fragile quality in reaction to the wet clay. This combination of materials creates the look and feel of each drawing.
My interest is not in directing the actions or movements of the audience but rather in creating a situation. I hope that this collective experience brings to mind a multiply of associations and responses, if it does then the work is successful.
The opening of the exhibition acts as a “happening” of sorts, and the subsequent viewings throughout the month serve as a standard presentation of art, or as a documentation of the opening event. In turn, the exhibition becomes almost two different entities based on not only when you see the show, but how.
I get questions:
* Can I walk on the tiles? * Yes.
* Why are the sounds of the tiles different? * The tiles are different lengths and are fired in the kiln to a variety of temperatures, which also creates the range of colors in the tiles.
* Will I fall? * No one has ever fallen while walking on the tiles. Your walk in the platform is a personal choice you make.
* Can I dance? * Certainly you can, but at your own risk. Many have danced and none have fallen.
* Will they break? * The tiles tend to chip and only occasionally do they break.
WALKING AS KNOWING AS MAKING // AN INVESTIGATION OF PLACE
John Dewey
An experience is a product one might almost say bi-product, of continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world. There is no other foundation upon which esthetic theory and criticism can build.
Art has aesthetic standing only as it becomes an experience for human beings. Art intensifies the sense of immediate living, and accentuates what is valuable in enjoyment. Art begins with happy absorption in activity. Anyone who does his work with care, such as artists, scientists, mechanics, craftsmen, etc., is artistically engaged.
Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle stated, “ All that was once directly lived has become mere representation. “ He is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society and how images have supplanted genuine human interaction.
Focusing on the urban environment, Debord wanted to create situations that heightened his emotional response to a realm of sensory derangement, a condition that engages all the senses and could cause him to grasp the essence of the activity that was surrounding him and his place in that activity.
As visual artists, our understanding of art and philosophy has been shaped by the dominance of vision over all the other senses. In Western culture, sight has historically been regarded as primary and thinking equated with seeing Art, according to this view, is sublimation, an activity that separates the perceiver from his or her body.
Through chance and happenings, the way an artist’s work or event was perceived could be in constant flux, and therefore have endless opportunities to be experienced or interpreted. In the late1950s and into the 1960s, the philosophies of composer John Cage permeated the arts. Allan Kaprow took Cage’s notion of incorporating all of life into (and as) music and invented the “happening,” where the human body took over as the artist’s medium, the environment the “canvas,” and the spontaneity of actions and occurrences surrogated the artist’s autonomy and hierarchy. Artists, writers, and musicians such as La Monte Young employed chance operations in their work, another principle, and virtue extolled by, Cage, influenced by the I Ching, the Chinese book of oracles, in his compositions and teachings.
Sol LeWitt must have had something similar in mind when in Sentences he says,
The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates… a painting (artwork) that points to the passage of time, to the mortality inherent in things –points to ephemerality.
